What factors does Fiverr's search algorithm use to identify and rank gigs on the platform?

[harshidvasoya]

Can you explain how the algorithm takes into account keywords, relevance, popularity, performance, and pricing when matching gigs with users' search queries?

[uk1000]

Their algorithm is confidential so we don't know lots of it. The gig title is one of the most important things for search though I think in terms of relevance (more important than gig description and probably more important than the search tags). edit: you could check the "Fiverr 3.0" thread and similar threads for ideas about those things.

We don't know how they take into account pricing but obviously if the buyer sets a minimum price it will show gigs that only have that minium (actually where one package or setting is >=that minimum, so you could have a gig with a $5 base price that's still shown for searches with a $10 budget and it may show the standard package and price in the results if that's $10). For pricing, for logged in buyers then they'll likely take into account past purchases, so if the buyer has bought things for $100 previously they might get shown results roughly around that price when doing similar searches in future (just guessing). Though since Fiverr will want to profit more they might prefer to generally show prices that aren't the lowest when when showing the gigs in the first pages of relevance.

We know performance things like late deliveries or cancellations can have a big effect on where your gig will get shown in results - it will probably go down quite a few pages in general (whichever buyer is searching) if you have cancellations/late deliveries. I expect average response time doesn't matter as much (eg. 2 hour average response time probably won't matter much compared to 1 hour avg. Though if it's very long eg. a day or more, which will affect response rate too, then that will probably affect your gig position quite a bit and chance of a buyer deciding to message).

Edited April 11 by uk1000

[vickiespencer]

5 hours ago, uk1000 said:

Their algorithm is confidential so we don't know lots of it. The gig title is one of the most important things for search though I think in terms of relevance (more important than gig description and probably more important than the search tags).

My SPM told me the algorithm looks first at titles, then search tags and the last place it checks is the gig description.